Telephones are one of the most widely used communication tools in the world. At first, telephones were merely a convenient tool to allow people to communicate while they were physically separated. More recently, however, many companies use telephones to market products and services, provide technical support to customers, allow customers to access their own financial data, and so forth.
In order to more effectively use telephones for business and marketing purposes, call centers have been developed. In a call center, a relatively large number of agents handle telephone communication with clients. The matching of calls between clients and agents is typically performed by software. A simple example is used here to describe a few of the many advantages of using call centers. When a call is made to a call center, the telephone number of the calling line is typically made available to the call center by a telephone carrier. Based on this telephone number, the software in the call center can access a database to obtain information about the client who has that phone number. The software can then better route the call to an agent who can best handle the call based on predefined criteria (e.g., language skill, knowledge of products the customer bought, etc.). The software also immediately transfers relevant information about the client to a computer screen used by the agent. Thus, the agent can gain valuable information about the customer prior to receiving the call. As a result, the agent can more effectively handle the telephone transaction.
It can be seen from the above example that the enabling technology requires a combination of telephone switching and computer information processing technologies. The term commonly used for this combined technology is computer-telephony-integration (CTI).
In recent years, advances in computer technology, telephony equipment, and infrastructure have provided many opportunities for improving telephone service. Similarly, development of the information and data network known as Internet, together with advances in computer hardware and software have led to a new multi-media telephone system which will be referred to herein as Internet Protocol Network Telephony (IPNT). IPNT is a special case of Data Network Telephony (DNT) wherein telephone calls are computer simulated, and audio is sent in data packets. In DNT systems as well as in the older intelligent and CTI-enhanced telephony systems, both privately and publicly switched, it is desirable to handle more calls faster and to provide improved service in every way. It is emphasized that computer simulated calls may be made over company Intranets and other sorts of data networks as well as the Internet. The Internet (Hence IPNT) is primarily used an as an example in this specification because it is broad and pervasive.
One of the major goals of any call center is to insure client satisfaction. Part of the satisfaction that a client receives from doing business with a company relates to how quickly he or she was served. For example, when a client calls in to place an order for a product or service, he or she does not want to be put on hold for a lengthy period of time. This is especially true with company-to-company buying of products or services. A typical buyer has many duties that can be interrupted because of inordinate amounts of time spent waiting to place an order. In these types of situations, idle time costs money, and in many cases, cannot be tolerated. Many orders are lost by companies who have put callers in long waiting queues only to have the caller hang up and, perhaps annoyed, buy from a competitor instead. Anyone who has experience dealing with call-centers will testify that much improvement is needed regarding long waits before being serviced.
Intelligent routing rules put in place in some intelligent networks have provided some relief for callers who would be stuck in queue much longer without them. For example, in some intelligent networks (known to the inventor), skill based routing, predictive routing, routing based on agent availability, as well as other intelligent implementations have provided for a better use of agent time within a call-center environment thereby shortening queue length and reducing waiting time. However, even with these forces in play, there are certain periods of time or "peak periods" during call-center operation that long waiting queues are unavoidable.
What is clearly needed is a method and apparatus implementing a virtual queue environment wherein callers may disconnect from the call center without losing their place in a queue, and still be served in the order they originally held in queue.